Becoming Information Conscious - 1 Introduction

In the past 10-15 years, the way we do business has been revolutionised by easy access to information, enabling us to work and collaborate much more flexibly. As long as I can get internet access, I have access to everything I need to run my business. What amazing freedom! Remember the days when you had to go to the office to get work done, to raise an invoice, to look at the proposal your colleague's just drafted?

Computing has become commoditised, and the line between a computer and a mobile device has become blurred. More than that, we expect to be able to access everything we need instantly and on any device. It's always been the case that we and our businesses exist within a sea of information, from our dealings with customers, suppliers and associates, to knowledge about others in our industry and even competitors. Technology now allows us to manage our data and interactions, connect with our customers and give our staff the freedom to excel in ways previous generations could only dream of. This is about people and relationships. Improving information flow improves communication, and so makes our businesses better and more useful.

But we need to be information conscious, aware of the information we use and how it is flowing. 

An information-conscious business will:
have highly motivated staff who can use their skills fully and work in a way that suits them
have happier customers who get excellent service as you deliver what they expect
scale your business because better information leads to better processes
understand what is going on in your business because you have the tools to tell you.

This is the sea of information that your business exists in:



The inner field is your business. The middle one contains people and organisations that your business interacts with directly, and the outer one represents the wider community who may or may not be aware of your business.

In this series of posts we’ll look at how information about your organisation flows through all of these areas, and how you can make those flows work to your advantage. A series of exercises helps you methodically analyse your business, and you’ll find some case studies that illustrate the pros and cons.  By analysing what information your business contains, you’ll go from a general feeling that you need better systems to specific plans for what kinds of systems will solve what problems and how to go about putting them in place.

This series of articles will cover these key points:
It's natural for a business to develop information islands as it grows and finds solutions to day-to-day problems.
Information islands hinder your productivity and your ability to service your customers.
Information-conscious businesses are aware of where their islands are and work to remove and connect them.

Look out for the second post in the series next week.

Why have an app?

Lots of people think they should have an app because it’s the latest thing and everyone’s doing it. But like anything in business, you should only do it if there’s a solid reason. We can think of six possible reasons you might really want or need one.

1. You have field staff who need to log their jobs

If you’re some sort of service company, like a cleaning business, a floor fitting firm or you have remote engineers, a key thing in your business is that you have staff going out to customer sites, and you need to schedule and log jobs.

Often companies like this struggle, because they have shared calendars that don’t work properly, they use group chats and text messages, and even paper job sheets.

Putting an app in place not only allows you to schedule work better, but it also allows people to see quickly what they have to do, and get sign-off and close those jobs down. That might include a customer signature, photos and a checklist.

The great thing about this is that the data is uploaded in real time, you can see it instantly in the office and it can be reported on and give you management information so you can see what’s actually happening in your business.

2. You want to speed up your sales and quotation process

We’ve all been in the situation where we’ve had a salesman in our kitchen quoting for double glazing, heating or something. They’ve filled out a paper form in triplicate, used their calculator and got something wrong and had to check something with the office. Meanwhile you, the customer, has to sit and stare out of the window and wonder if you’re going to make the school run or that important conference call.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just open up a tablet, fill in a form really quickly, it would do all the calculations on the fly, and the quote is processed and can even be signed off right there and then on the device.

Then it’s already in the back office systems, ready to go and it just makes you as a business look so much slicker and the whole process is quicker.

If on the other hand you sit at your desk making quotes in Excel, and you have to copy and paste and it’s all a bit inaccurate and time-consuming because you have to remember which formula goes where, then we can put web apps in place that will help with that as well.

3. Coaches and consultants with a system

If you’d like to sell the system to clients and make it easier for them to implement it, an app can really help.

Most systems of this type have some sort of goal setting and tracking, some sort of to do list and also some kind of reflection. An app is in your clients’ hand and can remind them to do it and is easy to use when they have a few spare moments.

Not only is it a tool that you can sell to your clients (or include with their package) to allow you to help them better and for them to help themselves, but it’s also a ‘product for prospects’ which you can sell as a subscription service to people who are interested in what you do but aren’t yet ready to pay the full price.

Then, you’ll be top of their minds and they’ll be using your branded stuff every day so it’s a great way of raising brand awareness while also bringing in some revenue.

4. Niche manufacturers who want to have digital manuals and how-to guides
Paper manuals can be pretty horrible things - we all hate the manuals that come with our devices and often don’t read them and they languish in the bottom of a drawer.

If you’re making specialist equipment, clearly it’s important that your customers use it properly, and yet the kind of practical, hands on people who these are likely to be are probably not ones to sit down and read a paper manual.

You’re much more likely to get their engagement in an app on a phone, with pictures and video content that you can upload easily. Not only that but you can use the app to show latest updates, hints and tips.

5. You have small, repeat orders from the same customers

If your orders tend to be one-offs, then you’re probably better with a good shopping cart on your website, but if you sell a lot of small stuff that is basically repeat business to repeat customers, an app is going to speed up the process for everyone involved.

For example, if you run a cafe who does catering for local business, for meeting lunches or breakfasts, and you have an app where they can quickly order their sandwiches, vegan wraps, bacon rolls and croissants, that’s going to make it so easy for them to order and for you to fulfill those orders.

Another example would be a trades supplies business. If you supply consumables like glue, nails etc to tradesmen, again if they can re-order quickly from an app then the whole process will be easier and they are more likely to use you again and again, rather than popping in to whichever B&Q happens to be closest to their job.

6. You want a contact form that does a bit more

A lot of the time when people come to us, it turns out that all they really need is a contact form on their website with a good process behind it.

But, you can make a contact form that does a whole lot more because as well as collecting details it can install itself as an app on the customer’s desktop browser or phone. Then it can send notifications and reminders, tell you where a customer is and in general get them much more engaged with your business.

In summary

There are lots of reasons you might need an app, and these are just the ones we could come up with. If you think any of these scenarios apply to you, or they jog other ideas, please get in touch!

www.nuvola.co.uk

To Facebook or not to Facebook

I came across an article this morning on The Register arguing that it's time we 'divorced' Facebook as it's 'abusive'. So should we?

The core of the argument is that the cost of connecting easily with friends (and not-so-friends) is the amount Facebook knows about us, and this is too great. Facebook's experiments in emotional manipulation have been fairly well publicised. And we've heard plenty about the echo chamber effect, and the nefarious manipulation of social media for political ends. But, so far as we know, Facebook has to date been mostly interested in selling ads and has yet to do anything bad. The free-market, libertarian ideals of Silicon Valley, whether you agree with them or not, probably mean this is likely to continue in the medium term at least.

But how much do we trust an organisation that knows so much about us? What's interesting is that most people don't seem too bothered about how much information the likes of Facebook, Google and others hold on them, and this is even more true of the digital native generations. But it seems to me that the more people know about this stuff, the more they do seem to worry. I consider myself a techie, but not an extreme techie. I use StartPage as my search engine because it gives good results but doesn't track me, and even though I use Google for a lot of stuff (including this blog), I use Firefox as my main browser rather than Chrome because I figure Google already knows enough. I turn off Google location history on my phone. But a friend of mine who is a data analyst and really knows what companies can do with the data they gather doesn't put his real birthday on Facebook, doesn't have an email address with his real name in it and as far as I know is even more careful about his online privacy.

So, Facebook. Should we keep feeding the beast and hoping it doesn't bite us? It's hard not to, and there's no doubt about the social benefits. I am far more in touch with my cousin in New Zealand than I would be if it weren't for Facebook, and there are so many people from past bits of my life that I would certainly have completely lost touch with without it. I don't have their Messenger on my phone and don't really feel the need for it, although of course WhatsApp (which I do use) is now owned by Facebook.

I've always thought we (humanity) needs a social network run along the same lines as Wikipedia, not for profit and not ad driven. Others have tried to do this (e.g. Ello), but it will take a lot to gain the traction of a massive commercial operation. The author of the Register article says we should divorce Facebook. But we don't yet believe that we're in an abusive relationship.

Retro phones...

So the mobile phone industry has officially run out of ideas. While my 11-year old might like to tell me that the Samsung she inherited from her mum is better than my LG, the reality is that one smartphone is pretty much like another. Yes each generation has a slightly better screen, camera and processor. But they all take photos, play music, do messaging, access the internet and even make phone calls.

Yawn.

But now the company that bought the Nokia brand has relaunched the old 3310, and the whole consumer electronics world is massively excited about a phone that is, well, a phone. And that's about it.

Is it because of 40-somethings nostalgic about when smartphones didn't rule our lives? Or the novelty value for 20 years olds of a phone that can't connect to the internet?

Or is it that there is a real market for a simple device with a battery that lasts a month? Personally, I think if they added 4G connectivity and a wifi access point (but no actual internet enabled apps), they'd really be onto something. After all, internet and voice anywhere with a battery that would last (for example) a full two week camping holiday would have real value for me.

So, will be interested to see what's the next novelty retro gadget to come out. In the mean time I'll be scouring eBay for an old Nokia I can give to my kids when they use up all their credit and I need to just CALL them...

The trouble with Android...

So let me first start by saying that in terms of mobile phones, I was a convert from a (fairly early) iPhone to the world of Android. Why? Because I could set up my Android phone how I wanted, not how Apple thought I should. I could add widgets for weather, news and music to the home screen which you couldn't do on an iPhone then. And I could get my music and photos on and off it without using the monstrosity that is iTunes.

In short, Android appealed (and still does) to my sense of wanting to actually own and be in control of the device and what was on it. The iPhone felt like a prettified version of my 1999 Palm Pilot.

But here's the thing that concerns me now about Android: security. iPhones are now heavily encrypted by default (as the FBI famously found out in 2016). Most Android phones aren't, although you can turn it on if you like (newer ones will often be encrypted however).

There's also the question of apps stealing data. As I had to explain to my daughter, the keyboard in Android is just an app, and most of us use the one the phone came with. But she had installed a free one called 'Emoji Keyboard' or something like that. I had to point out to her that she had no way of telling whether the keyboard was sending everything she typed (including texts to her friends and passwords) to a central server, linking it to her Google ID.

So I'm beginning to wonder if the walled-garden, controlled world of Apple is actually better than the Wild West of Android.

Why email's broken (and how to fix it)

The world sends around 210 billion emails per day (source: the Radicati Group, Email Statistics Report 2015-2019). That's something like 30 per man, woman and child on the planet. Every day. That's a lot of messages.

Roughly 4 petabytes give or take and depending on whose figure you trust. Or 4 with 15 zeros after it characters. By way of comparison, the text of Wikipedia's 5.3 million English articles contain only about 3 millionths of that data, which is still enough to fill 2398 printed volumes.

So by any measure, we generate a lot of email traffic. But here's the thing. Most of that traffic is wasted.

To demonstrate, I did a little very non scientific experiment - I found a recent 10 message email conversation in my inbox, and copy-pasted the useful text (i.e. the complete last message with all of the replies below) into a text editor. Then I compared this with the size in my actual mailbox. What I found was that while the messages in the mailbox were about 650kB, the actual text, even allowing for the hidden meta data that identifies the messages, sender and so on, were more like 30kB. One of the messages took 74,000 characters for me to say simply, "I can do 8:30 tomorrow, yes".

Is it any wonder our mailboxes are flooded and overflowing? And that the young and trendy are increasingly moving to messaging apps?

Email is old by computing standards - the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) will be 35 this year. It has been improved a lot for security and spam prevention, but it's still the same basic, simple system where sending mail servers look up the 'mail exchanger' for a domain and send the message to it. No proprietary protocols or software (like WhatsApp), no per message charges (like SMS) and if everyone implemented encryption in transit it could be fairly secure (not everyone does though...). The simplicity and openness is why it refuses to die, especially in the business world.

But the reason for the bloat is nothing to do with the venerability of the protocol. There are actually two things. First, we like nicely formatted text, with bold characters, different fonts and even embedded images and so on. So the email needs to include markup, which is the codes that describe the formatting (like a web page) - this makes it bigger (<p class="body-text"> <span color="blue">Yes I agree</span></div> is obviously a lot bigger than 'Yes I agree'). Also it is pretty standard to include a plain text version for 'old' email programs that can't read the rich HTML, which of course no one actually uses these days so that's a waste.

But I can't see any of us giving up our rich text email. I'm old enough to remember text-based email software - I certainly don't want to go back to that. What we could change is the quoted text below the line. Why do we need it? Pretty much all email programs these days have the ability to sort a message by conversation, and behind the scenes they also tell the recipients the unique message identifier that they're responding to to make it more reliable. So why do I need to quote the message I'm replying to? I certainly don't feel the need when I send a text message on my phone or use Skype chat, because the conversation is there for me to read.

So here's an idea. Why don't we all turn off the 'quote message when replying' feature? It'd be weird at first, but we'd soon get used to it. And we'd end up sending a lot less crap with our emails, as well as not getting ourselves into trouble by forwarding something we were told in confidence 12 messages back to someone we shouldn't have. Now who's going to be brave enough to go first???

What's in an operating system?

Windows, Mac OS X, Android, Linux, iOS, they all have their fans and detractors, but which is actually best?

Personally, I have spent the last 8 or so years avoiding Windows and refusing to pay the premium for Apple devices, so I've for the most part had desktop and laptop computers with Ubuntu Linux, and tablets and phones with Android. This changed a couple of months ago when I decided I needed a low end machine for travelling that was both tablet and laptop, so I bought a cheap Windows 10 convertible laptop/tablet. And it pretty much does everything I want it to do very nicely, even bits of coding. Oh and I also got a second hand Mac mini for a mobile app project I'm working on.

And this has all led me to the conclusion that really, for the majority of people, the operating system isn't important, especially for personal use. What most people do on computers is browse the web, send email, do a bit of document and spreadsheet writing and maybe photo editing. And you can get most major apps for both Android and iOS, and increasingly Windows phone. You can also avoid the 'Microsoft tax' if you use LibreOffice instead of MS office and Mozilla Thunderbird instead of Outlook, although to be fair Office 365 has made that cost much more manageable (I remember when I had an IT support business people got very shocked when buying new computers that they had to spend almost as much again on Office software). All the modern OS's are pretty slick in their own way.

So what's in an operating system? Well, if you are a developer, you are going to want to match what you're developing for. And of course Macs have the best reputation for 'creative' software, although I think Windows has pretty much caught up now. For me, since I still do a fair bit of my own development for Linux webservers, having a Linux machine to do that on makes it a lot easier. For everyone else, it probably doesn't matter that much.